

Systems also bring about benefits in terms of inventory and spend management. Potential users can benchmark their current pricing against aggregated costs. Ways to mitigate supply chain risk in IoTĪs well as the resilience that comes with multiple supplier options, there are often cost savings for firms too. For example, eProcurement platforms that aggregate hundreds of suppliers into a single portal are changing the way that companies purchase their supplies. But digging deeper into source-to-pay services offered by firms such as DSSI, and other providers, highlights the capacity of managed procurement solutions to keep operations moving. ‘Onshoring’, ‘reshoring’, and even ‘friend-shoring’ are some of the more common buzzwords. Progressive procurement solutions may not immediately spring to mind as the first choice for fixing supply chain issues.

But with unknown events ahead, deploying processes such as source-to-pay to bake in supply chain resilience shows foresight. “Between September 2019 and September 2021, the cost of shipping a 40’ container from China to the US West Coast had increased from $1,500 to $20,586,” recalls Eytan Buchman of Freightos, a global freight booking platform. And costs for firms receiving parts from their suppliers in the far east have dropped dramatically from the eye-watering highs of 2021. The queues of container ships waiting off the coast to unload their goods – a familiar sight at major ports just 12 months ago, as global supply chains were upended by the pandemic – have eased.
